Certain food items, particularly delicate ones such as fish steaks, filets and croquettes are difficult to lift and remove from cooking surfaces such as frying pans, grills and barbecue surfaces, and to invert and deposit onto cooking and other surfaces such as serving trays, platters and cutting boards. These food items when partly or fully cooked. tend to break up easily during one or more of such maneuvers. Such delicate food items tend to lack cohesiveness and can stick to and be difficult to remove in one piece from their cooking surfaces, for example, if the foods are over-cooked or lack juices, or if the foods are not displaced and/or inverted sufficiently to prevent sticking to these surfaces.
Conventional cooking utensils employing a flat blade are often ineffective because the blades are not wide enough or long enough to fully engage and fully support fish steaks or other delicate foods. Also, it can be difficult to use conventional cooking utensils to lift delicate food items in one piece from and invert and deposit them in that condition onto cooking and other surfaces because the utensils are designed such that rotation of the utensil occurs about axis of the handle, rather than about the longitudinal central axis of the blade itself.
Thus, heretofore, there has not been a satisfactory cooking utensil for easily lifting partly or fully cooked delicate food items from cooking surfaces and for inverting and depositing them in one piece onto cooking and other surfaces.